I have a good friend who grew up and went to school with a guy who, a few years out of high school, ended up murdering two women.
He’s often told me about what this person was like before he became a killer and I’ve always found the whole thing very fascinating.
And you probably feel the same way if you’re here reading this article.
AskReddit users who knew killers talk about when they knew something was wrong.
1. Awful.
“Sat next to him in choir class. He was always kind of off.
He operated on his own wavelength. Constantly in his own world, never really engaging with anybody. People just didn’t really exist on his radar. On a class trip we slept in the same hotel room and he walked around naked like I wasn’t even there.
I always assumed he was autistic, but in hindsight it might have been something much worse, like schizophrenia. He never seemed violent, but nobody ever talked to him enough to ever make that conclusion in the first place.
A few months ago he beat and stabbed his mother to death with a kitchen knife. It was so bad dental records were needed to identify the body. He cut off one of her breasts and implied in his confession that he ate part of it. He waited until his dad came home from work to show him what he’d done.
Claimed he saw a sign from the devil that told him to kill her. (That may have been a lie. From what I heard he was very excited to tell the police what he had done. And from what I do know about him, he might have said it for the attention.) He turned himself in, waived his Miranda rights, and confessed to everything.
When the cops found him he was literally soaked in blood. He refused to shower it off, so they had to hose him down before they put him in a cell. He’s looking at 40 years in prison.
His Mom was an amazing woman, she tailored our suits for choir and was constantly volunteering. If there was an event, she was there. She was gonna be her town’s councilwoman next year. She loved her son very much. She didn’t deserve to die like that.”
2. Distant.
“I went through primary and high school with a guy in the year below me who seemed a little… distant. We lived near each other and caught the bus from the same stop.
He was a bit of a bully but it was something more. Like you could tell he wasn’t a bully because he was hurting inside or because he felt threatened in some way, he was a bully because he did what he wanted to do and didn’t realise that it hurt other people. Like the kind of kid who enjoyed pulling wings off flies.
Not long after I left my hometown I heard that he had been charged with the murder of a 2 year old. Apparently his girlfriend at the time left her daughter with him for an hour or so while she ran an errand. He couldn’t deal with the toddler crying anymore so he beat her.
He caused severe internal bleeding and she died in hospital not long after. He would have been around 22 when he did it. He was sentenced to 36 years with a non parole period of 27 years.
This happened in Australia around 2014.”
3. Cold and angry.
“I moved to a new town when I was 19 and was making new friends at my new job. I met this girl at work and she invited me over to hang out with her and her best friend.
I went and the best friend’s boyfriend was there and the vibes were waaay off. I was uncomfortable. He was cold, and just seemed angry for no reason. They had mentioned to me before he got there that he was always controlling and had hit the girl before.
Turns out controlling was an understatement. She came home one day and he was digging a hole in the backyard and she asked what he was doing and he replied “digging your grave.” He hit her, said if he can’t have her, nobody could have her, all of that.
So eventually she left him and had to get a restraining order and everything. He somehow persuaded her to get in a car with him on her work break and they went missing for a few days. Turns out he stabbed her to death, threw her in a river and killed himself.
I met the girl only a few times and him only the once but the face that I was in such close proximity to someone capable of that gives me chills. She was so young, it was really sad.”
4. Always off.
“I worked at a box store about 20 years ago, a guy I worked with was always “off,” and would give away pocket knives to other employees.
One day he came in with scratches all over his face; he had r*ped and murdered a disabled girl the day before, using a pocket knife he had given our co-worker later that day.”
5. My uncle.
“My uncle murdered somebody and is currently serving life in prison.
From my earliest memory I knew he had some screws loose.”
6. Father and son.
“I knew a guy who killed his dad with a baseball bat (found not guilty).
I met his dad when he came in to the bar I worked at. He was a nightmare. He would squeeze peoples’ hands when he shook them. He and his son were both boxers and the dad was really rough with him apparently.
The day he was found not guilty he sent a text to someone at the bay saying ‘I told you I would get off”.”
7. Not surprised…
“I know a guy who murdered a nurse and wanted our towns first serial killer. He bought a “murder kit” online and stabbed her over 50 times. Let’s call him Steve.
I knew him through scouts. Now, to preface, our scout troop was pretty laid back. We didn’t tend to bother with badges and the two troop leaders were pretty cool guys. Mostly we played silly games like crab football, built catapults to fire stuff across the hall at each other etc. You get the picture.
We were a little bit a gang of misfits. But Steve was really weird. First time it came out was when he would do this thing where he’d get his b*tt out and dance around. At first it was like outrageous and funny, and he kept getting told to stop.
When he kept doing it got a bit annoying (none of us were keen to see his bare arse…), then it got boring, then just outright weird when its not remotely funny, no one wanted him to do it and he continued.
He also used to bring in print outs of super gross porn (obviously confiscated and thrown away). Again, he was clearly trying to gross people out for his amusement.
A few times he was suspended for a week or so but give we were quite laid back and the troop leaders were good guys, they probably couldn’t bring themselves to bin him off completely.
It was a long time ago so I can’t recall all the details but I recall him being quite childish in mentality but also veeeery creepy.
When I found out i was shocked, but not surprised. Then I remembered I’d played hide and seek in the dark with this guy, in a hall with a kitchen full of knives…”
8. Regular guy.
“A regular customer in my shop.
He would come in to buy beer and tobacco. On one occasion he caught and helped us to evict a shoplifter. He seemed friendly enough. A local girl went missing and was eventually pulled out of a river a few weeks later.
Police announced they were looking for a man in connection with her death and it was him. They had CCTV footage of him tailing her through a park and footage of him buying beer in a shop, still unconfirmed to this day being our shop as they blurred out the surroundings.
Anyway, as we had a TV in our shop switched to the news channel as it was a rolling story local to us, we started to discuss the guy, if we saw him on the day she went missing, that kind of thing.
We hadn’t, but it was at that point when one of my staff, a young girl, who had previously said to management that she didn’t want to work the closing shift anymore because there was “too many creepy men around”, told us that he used to stare at her when he came in to the store in a way that made her uncomfortable enough to not want to be on the floor when he came in.
They never got to question him about the murder as he was found dead in a local park a few days later. He’d hung himself.”
9. Didn’t suspect anything.
“I never suspected a thing. She was the nicest woman, I even let her babysit my cousin when I had custody of him for a little while.
She was my neighbor (couple houses down) and everyone loved her, she grew gigantic pumpkins, was always outside, so everyone interacted with her a lot. I moved away and a few years later and was shocked to hear everything from my family and friends who still loved in the area.
The story: She was married to a man, I knew him from my time living there too. One day, he was just gone. She was all beaten up. She said he beat her up (we always suspected this happened before this incident) and had left her because he got a woman pregnant a few towns over. We never heard from him again, but didn’t really have a reason to.
She would mention every once in a while that he was still harassing her and was even beat up on another occasion after his disappearance. He was self-employed and didn’t really have any family, no one suspected anything. Three years later she was dating another man. While dating this man, the police had been investigating her for stealing money from the grocery store she worked at.
They went to the boyfriends cabin, where they both were, to arrest her. She came to the door, said ok, let me go put on some clothes. The police waited at the door (I obviously wasn’t here for this part, so this is what I hear). The police then hear two gunshots. They run inside and she had poured gasoline and set the house on fire then shot her dog then herself. It took some time to get the house fire under control.
Once they did, and began investigating, they found another body in the basement that didn’t die in the fire, but several days earlier. The body in the basement was her boyfriend. Then, they began investigating further, and found a blue 55 gallon drum in her backyard that contained her husband.
So, she killed 2 people and her dog, and all she was suspected of was stealing from the grocery store.”
10. Nobody liked him.
“My ex-coworker was always a huge d*ck who nobody liked to work with.
He’d always be on his phone and talking to someone, even when he had a customer waiting to order in the drive-thru. The moment I knew he had something wrong with him was when I caught him “looking for his dab pen” in one of the lockers in the backroom.
He always used a top locker, but he was searching through one at the bottom, which happened to be my locker for the day. I told him that, so he just stared me in the face for a second, and walked away.
Later that same year, I learned that he shot and killed someone at a gas station.”
11. Deep sadness.
“A co-worker lived with his elderly dad. He was a super nice, but just always had this deep sadness behind his face.
His gf broke up with him, his dad’s health went south. Everything became too much so he shot his dad and then himself. Even after hearing that, I felt bad for him.
He seemed like a dude with a big heart and if he just had a day to decompress and someone to talk to, I think it would have gone a lot differently.”
Have you ever been acquainted with a killer or a violent criminal?
If so, tell us about it in the comments.
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